Welcome from Rusty Braziel

Energy markets are big, complicated and can be daunting. Today these markets are going through some of the biggest changes in decades. A few years back shale and tight sands technologies hit the natural gas business, resulting in huge supply surpluses that continue with us today. The same upheaval has since rolled through the natural gas liquids and crude oil markets, which now are also experiencing surplus conditions. Almost weekly new investments in infrastructure are announced. Companies are buying and selling assets. Partnerships and alliances are developing across industries and geographies. With all this going on, there should be a better way to get information from those who have it, to those who need it. That is the idea behind RBN.

I’ve been involved in the energy business for more than three decades. I’ve been a programmer, analyst, planner and energy trader. I was with Texaco (now Chevron) for 20 years with jobs that included Manager of NGL Supply and VP of Natural Gas Marketing and Trading. In the 90’s I founded and served as CEO of Altra Energy Technologies, an energy software and electronic trading company. In the early 2000s I was VP of NGLs for Link Energy, a successor to EOTT (the oil trading and transportation assets of Enron). From 2005 to early 2012 I was a member of the executive team at Bentek Energy, building that company into an industry leader in energy information and analytics. In 2018 I was honored to be appointed by U.S. Secretary of Energy Rick Perry to serve as a member of the National Petroleum Council.

Through all of that, I met a lot of people. And when I could, I helped people with complementary skills and needs to get together so they could make the best use of all the information available to analyze and understand energy markets. It always seemed to me that there was a lot more that could be done if the right processes – the right network – were in place.

So that is what RBN is all about – making connections across energy markets. We connect energy data with the information needed to understand that data. We connect physical markets for energy commodities with financial markets for managing risk. And most importantly, we connect the people who need energy market information with those that provide that information.

We make those connections in our five business functions: our daily blog, consulting and advisory services, Backstage PassTM premium services, School of Energy and frequent participation of several of our executive team members as speakers at industry conferences and events. More about RBN’s Business.